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A PARADISE OF SMALL HOUSES

THE EVOLUTION, DEVOLUTION, AND POTENTIAL REBIRTH OF URBAN HOUSING

A thoughtful history of affordable housing that establishes the basis for reasoned discussion and well-informed policy.

A history of the “common everyday houses” that have served large numbers of working- and middle-class households in the U.S.

Podemski—author, illustrator, and transportation planner for Los Angeles—dreams of affordable housing that’s light-filled and spacious, connects people to their neighbors, fits seamlessly into mixed-use and walkable neighborhoods, and has “the potential to change and adapt.” He seeks “a diversity of housing at a range of scales that reflect the unique circumstances of individual neighborhoods.” Chronicling his travels in a host of American cities and Vancouver, British Columbia, he focuses on specific housing types in each, including shotgun houses in New Orleans, bungalows in Portland, Oregon, and multifamily triple-deckers in Boston. The L.A. dingbat, built in the 1950s and 1960s, is two floors of wood-framed, stucco-clad apartments hovering over parking spaces, while the Philadelphia row house, constructed when the city industrialized, is a narrow, brick-clad, three-story home meant for the working class. With the exception of Houston, whose anemic land-use controls have given rise to wide, two-story town houses sitting above a two-car garage and crowding their lots, the author praises his examples for serving the needs of owners and renters and encouraging neighborliness. Podemski also offers a brief history of each city’s spatial development and considers the precursors and successors to each housing type. Despite his implicit interest in what can be mass produced, he includes two bespoke examples: Tiny Tower (three levels on a 12-by-20-foot footprint) in Philadelphia and 3106 St. Thomas Street (10.5 by 45 feet, metal clad, one story) in New Orleans. Podemski makes two important points: First, the vibrancy of a neighborhood depends on its type of housing; second, housing affordability is dependent on lot size and housing type. His argument is convincing.

A thoughtful history of affordable housing that establishes the basis for reasoned discussion and well-informed policy.

Pub Date: March 26, 2024

ISBN: 9780807007785

Page Count: 272

Publisher: Beacon Press

Review Posted Online: Nov. 18, 2023

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2023

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ABUNDANCE

Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.

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Helping liberals get out of their own way.

Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.

Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.

Pub Date: March 18, 2025

ISBN: 9781668023488

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Avid Reader Press

Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025

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A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES

For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.

Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979

ISBN: 0061965588

Page Count: 772

Publisher: Harper & Row

Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979

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